Robin Murray, the Potential of Social Innovation and Transforming the Fiscal World
By Geoff Mulgan
Some people are flat. Some people are like yeast. They make other things rise up. Robin was one of them, enlivening in every sense of the word, with charisma, presence, a chuckle on his lips and a twinkle in his eyes, exuding joy in life and in other peoples’ voices and lives.
Like yeast too he was relatively invisible – certainly not a household name – even though, through his method and his work, he influenced in profound ways how we eat, how we shop, how we work, how we create and how we handle waste.
I was lucky enough to know Robin Murray first as a rather distant boss in the now ancient days of the GLC, then as a collaborator on many projects, from reimagining tax systems to recycling, to later teaching municipal officials in China, to mapping the world’s social innovation system.
One of the first projects he helped shape was what became the cultural industries part of the London Industrial Strategy. This was one of the first attempts ever to look at the world of the arts through an economic and industrial lens. It led to an emphasis on investment in smaller firms; supporting what we would now call platforms to help them reach wider audiences otherwise controlled by oligopolies; and a recognition of just how much these industries help to give voice to new social forces. Thirty years later most of the big cities of the world have similar policy programmes in place and it’s now taken for granted that the creative industries are an important source of jobs and wealth – yet at that time ‘arts policy’ meant subsidies for the opera, theatres and galleries.
A few years later when I had set up Demos we worked together to write a pamphlet on tax. This was one of the most difficult political issues of the times, particularly for the left (which had just lost yet another election in part because of its proposals for raising tax). Generally left wingers were in favour of tax not just pragmatically but almost as a mark of virtue. Yet most of the public were at best sceptical and saw tax as a necessary evil but not something to celebrate. We liked this quote from Joseph Schumpeter: that ‘the spirit of a people, its cultural level, its social structure, the deeds its policy may prepare – all this and more is written in its fiscal history, stripped of all phrases. He who knows how to listen to the message here discerns the thunder of world history more clearly than anywhere else.’
Our analysis highlighted two big strategic problems with the organisation of tax. One was that the tax relationship no longer worked in representative democracy because the link between payments and results was too opaque: money appeared to disappear into a black hole, which made it much harder to legitimate taxation. The second problem was that the internationalisation of the economy meant the methods used for taxing business were hopelessly anachronistic; the biggest businesses could avoid most taxes through devices like internal pricing mechanisms. Both in different ways contributed to tax revolt, fiscal pressures and unease in politics.
We offered many possible answers – including limited forms of hypothecation, and new corporate taxes to capture rents. Some of the ideas proposed were later put into effect. Yet much of the analysis still seems right – with little visibility to most of the public about where their tax money goes, and firms like Amazon and Google continuing to avoid corporate taxes.
My guess is that fiscal issues will become even more important in the next few years: we will hopefully see a shift away from employment as the main thing to be taxed towards consumption, ecology, land and wealth. At long last we may see a reorientation of tax to capture the global nature of economic activity, a topic Robin worked on for many years and that has been exacerbated as the economy has become ever more founded on intangibles.
In work of this kind I directly benefited from Robin’s enlivening character but also saw his impact on others, his contagious practical optimism. At the Young Foundation he sometimes came to just hang out, serving as an in-house therapist as a stream of people would pass by, have a chat, and come away with their cobwebs cleared away, a stronger sense of their way ahead, and confidence that obstacles could be overcome.
When I first worked for him at the GLC he periodically wrote detailed critiques deconstructing what I had done, and reconstructing it in a far better way. These were quite remarkable and involved. Indeed, the first time he took me through one of these lists of improvements, was also the first time I heard the word ‘seventeenthly’. Here I will restrict myself to five points.
1. Dive
First, Robin liked to dive deep into detail and believed that you should observe, talk, listen, map and then reconstruct until you gain a sense of how a system works. That could be energy in self-build homes, recycling of plastics, or the distribution of cocoa-nuts, but always following Bertolt Brecht’s maxim that “truth is in the concrete”.
I fondly remember walking the streets of Huddersfield 20 years ago mapping waste, piecing together the movements of glass and paper and plastics. It was perhaps not entirely glamorous but it was never dull, and interestingly this year I have been working with dozens of the UNDP’s Accelerator Labs around the world on very similar projects – designing new ways of managing waste in urban slums, but now helped by much more sophisticated data and visualisation tools that I’m sure Robin would have loved.
These are approaches opposite to most of the economics profession who tend to deduce, to make sense of the world from an armchair and secondary sources. But it’s a much healthier approach not least because it means being constantly surprised by the peculiarities of the world at it is in reality rather than how a model says it is.
2. Interrogate
Second, Robin liked to investigate through interrogation, learning by asking questions, as if decoding a fascinating puzzle, and so eliciting that curiosity we all have somewhere inside, the excitement when codes are broken.
That’s one of the reasons why he was such fun to work with. Projects were not linear, but rather voyages with detours, rambles and hikes, and, to mix my metaphors, they were less like linear logic and more a mix of peeling onions, cracking nuts, unravelling knots. Again, that ability to use questions must be part of why he was such a good educator.
3. Embed
Third, everything he did was infused with values and the ability to see in everything not just what it is, but also what it could be, the untapped potential that’s waiting to be emancipated, set free, a distinctive fusing of Quakerism, liberalism and Marxism.
That confidence in potential meant that Robin always believed that people could be competent interpreters and shapers of their world, far more than current conditions could allow, and it was an approach he was able to apply to neighbourhoods, workplaces, indeed whole societies, and that seeking out of latent possibility gave an energy to everything he did, from his work on education in the Seychelles to local government in Britain.
4. Production
Fourth, he was much less interested in distribution than production, in contrast to much of the left who essentially wanted to leave capitalism to make the wealth and then get on with redistributing.
He wanted instead to explore different models of making things, to go upstream rather than downstream: hence the interest in the economic lessons to be learned from Emilia Romagna or Mondragon, the ideas of Deming and Toyota, and later to the circular economy, and he wanted to generalise these to the wider economy so that production could be democratic and egalitarian in spirit not just distribution.
The question of how to do that should be right at the heart of economic policy at a time the vanguards have pulled further away from the rest, leaving behind stagnant pay and productivity, when democracy has still made so little inroads into the world of work, and when perhaps more than ever we need new organising models for everything from taxi services to care, that empower rather than enslave, one of many reasons why the timing of his departure is so unfortunate.
5. Meaning
Fifth, and finally, he believed that it was not enough to do projects, to be satisfied with interesting pilots. Instead he believed we should always look to their meaning and implications, how they could be part of a large whole.
This ambition to link the micro and macro was always fertile – the macro could be reimagined by drawing on the lessons of a million small experiments, the theme of his work on post-Fordism and later of the Open Book of Social Innovation I worked on with him and Julie Simon. But the micro could also be illuminated and energised by being connected to the electricity of grander goals.
That was why he so appreciated the work of Carlota Perez and others, their political economy in the grandest sense that situated the financial crisis and its aftermath in a much bigger historical story that showed how as the tectonic plates of economies shift new spaces open for social innovation.
It was why from his work at the GLC to coops, he sought in everything ways to prefigure, to see what in the present could point to a better future, a wholly refashioned trading system; a city without carbon; a circular economy. It’s also probably why he so liked local government – which handily straddled the micro and the macro – even during a period when it was being savagely cut back. Together these meant a constant iteration between the small and the large, seeing the world in a grain of sand but also seeing a possible world in a small seed too.
And out of these methods, diving, questioning, liberating potential, remaking production and using the small to illuminate and transform the big, he influenced how we eat, how we shop, how we work, how we create and how we handle waste. So why spell these out? Partly to celebrate him but also because everything in his method is what we need now.
At a time of nostalgia, blocked progress, we need that infectious optimism, that sense of latent potential. At a time when politics on many fronts is comfortable with vague slogans we need that attention to the real and the concrete. And, at a time of widespread fatalism, we need that confidence that the world is waiting to be made and remade right here, right now, the spirit which says that if something is wrong, then something must be done and we might as well be the ones to do it.
One of greatest pleasures visiting Robin and Frances was when a conversation would be fuelled by something they had just cooked, a cake, bread or scones, fresh from the oven. That may be why I associate him with yeast. Some people are flat. Robin made things rise.
August 2020